PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture 12: Lecture 12+13 Form Perception.docx
19 Mar 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
A group of psychologists in germany called gestalt psychologists began to study how people perceive the world around them. With respect to perception, they firmly believed that the whole is different than the sum of its parts . They believed that people tended to perceive the whole stimulus rather than just putting together a collection of the stimulus" discrete parts. The gestalt movement was in part a reaction to the structuralist approach at the time, which suggested that everything could be reduced to basic elements. Motion is an emergent property of the sequence of pictures. The perception of the movie in its entirety is something more than the collection of thousands of still photographs. Gestalt psychologists also proposed laws of organization that described how we group visual input in certain ways. These laws of organization are called the gestalt principles and it is thought that they are innate or that we acquire them rapidly. There are six of them: figure-ground.
